Fresh & New(er)

discussion of issues around digital media and museums by Seb Chan

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M&W07 – Day three: Radical Trust – State of the Museum Blogosphere

April 14th, 2007 by Seb Chan

Jim Spadaccini and I have just finished presenting our mini-workshop surveying the museum blogosphere.

The detailed results are online at Archimuse, and the slides including updated data are available here.

(update – Nate at Walker Art has posted some discussion of the q&a at the end of the presentation)

Tags: 5 Comments

  • http://www.museumtwo.blogspot.com Nina Simon

    Does anyone have a good strategy for Technorati tracking of blogs when they move? Museum 2.0 is ranked 112,840 per the blogspot address, but that doesn’t translate to the new museumtwo.com address… I’m sure this happens to all kinds of blogs. Suggestions?

  • Seb Chan

    Hi Nina

    I think the only way to do it properly is to delete your blog from Technorati (under the old Blogspot URL) then re-add it with the new URL including going thru the whole confirmation process with Technrati again.

    Your rankings won’t necessarily start from scratch but bear in mind most people’s exisrting linkbacks will be to your old URL and there isn’t much you can do about that.

    If you run the webserver it is hosted on then you can always set up a permanent re-write rule which will tell spiders that the content has permanently moved to the new address (which updates Google for example).

    Seb

  • http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/ Brian Kelly

    I’d also suggest period posts on your old blog reminding users who may still be subscribed to the RSS feed to update the entry in their RSS reader.

    Brian Kelly, UKOLN

  • http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/ Brian Kelly

    Hi Seb
    I very much enjoyed your session, and the discussions we had at the social event.
    However the term ‘Radical Trust’ doesn’t do much for me. I have described the reasons why on my UK Web Focus blog – see
    http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2007/04/19/radical-trust-were-doing-it/
    And, interestingly, I received a prompt response from collin douma from radicaltrust.ca who agrees with me – cultural heritage organisations have always been radical in their willingness to engage with their users. This is why I feel it is counter-productive to use this term.
    Anyway collin douma has said:

    I never understood why the term “radical trust” applies to museums in social media platforms like blogs. I would love a dialogue on this. Is it the same notion described in the paragraph you pulled from my blog above, or is it something else, more specific to museum technology?

    Feedback welcomed on this topic.

    Brian Kelly, UKOLN

  • http://www.freshandnew.org Seb Chan

    Hi Brian

    We came across ‘radical trust’ via the library sector.

    See Radical Trust & Web 2.0.

    I simplify the meaning to:

    Radical trust means trusting users not to muck things up (and rewarding them with control in return).

    It has a slightly different flavour to how it has been picked up in the commercial world (which owes a lot to the Cluetrain folk).

    In the museum world we allow users/customers to interact/engage in very controlled ways – via exhibtions, public events etc – and on the web there are now opportunities for museums to allow audiences to literally ‘take away’ digital replicas of our collections, much like libraries do when they let their users ‘borrow’ their collections (which is very much about trust).